So explains Oliver Sacks in a New York Review of Books essay on western science's developing model of the nature of consciousness, from William James' dreams of the zoetrope as "a metaphor for the conscious brain" to recent neurobiological theories of the neural basis of consciousness.

. . . Instead of seeing the brain as rigid, fixed in mode, programmed like a computer, there is now a much more biological and powerful notion of "experiential selection," of experience literally shaping the connectivity and function of the brain (within genetic, anatomical, and physiological limits, of course).